On tonight’s season finale of the CW’s DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Hawkman and Hawkgirl’s 4,000-year quest to kill the immortal Vandal Savage finally came to a successful end. After completing their mission, Hawkman and Hawkgirl were seen at the end of the finale flying off into the sunset.

With the Vandal Savage story arc over, we will see a lot less of Hawkman and Hawkgirl in Season 2. For actress Ciara Renée, who was a series regular on Season 1, playing Kendra Saunders aka Hawkgirl, that means that she is exiting as a series regular. (Falk Hentschel played Hawkman as a recurring guest star.)

This is the second major cast change on Legends heading into Season 2, along with Wentworth Miller’s departure as a series regular to become a regular in the combined Greg Berlanti universe, recurring on both Legends and The Flash next season.

Legends co-creator/executive producer Marc Guggenheim said that he and the series’ other writers did not know that Renée and Hentschel would not have a significant presence in Season 2 until they got together to think about next season.

“We went through the team, made a list of all the characters and started to think of stories for them. When we got to Hawkman and Hawkgirl, we had trouble coming up with stories. The bow was tied so tightly and neatly with their story in the finale, that everything we thought of felt very forced. After 4000 years, they were no longer under the specter of Vandal, and we felt they need some time off. Bringing them back to the team as soon as the the beginning of Season 2 felt premature.”

The idea behind Legends always was to have a rotating team of characters, Guggenheim said. “We have a very organic system in place to take a break form characters.”

In Season 2, “the composition of the team is going to change; there will be some new faces on the Waverider,” he said. “The season finale planted some very significant flags in terms of what the new concept of the show will be in season 2.”

Legends already is recruiting two new team members for next season, casting a male and female new regulars.

“We always wanted Legends to be distinct season to season, not only in terms of the composition of the team but also in terms of mission statements. The team’s mission statement for Season 2 is more compelling than Season 1, and at the same time, it is more streamlined. It’s a little bit higher concept, a very clean notion that will allow the show to do things that it does best.”